AI wars
In the B2B processes arena, last year was very much the “year of the smart cloud.” From Microsoft Azure Cortana Intelligence Suite to Salesforce Einstein to IBM’s Watson Analytics, baked-in AI and cloud analytics are now more convenient for businesses with B2B processes based in the cloud. Each of the major vendor tech conferences unveiled something new and exciting, and businesses seeking to add analytics to their shared B2B resources now have a number of platforms to choose from.
It’s important to realize that there’s very little “me too” among the cloud offerings; each vendor has chosen a different direction in how this new technology is deployed and used.
Microsoft, for instance, created its Cortana suite with build-it-yourself in mind. As with its SQL Server BI tools a decade ago, its strategy is to entice customer uptake by offering easy-to-use components for building analytics processes, rather than offering actual canned processes.
As an example, B2B partners could consolidate shared schemas (purchase orders and invoices, customer profiles, schedules, and so on) within a shared data lake in Azure, to simplify integration of local systems. Participating partners could reference common data in an Azure data catalog, to simplify discovery; and these resources could easily be made single-point accessible to in-house systems and other external processes via a data factory, making it possible to integrate gradually, rather than all at once.
On the other hand, many applications of analytics are more straightforward, rendering a building-block approach as overkill. The best use of shared analytics in some B2B partnerships might simply be a common platform for uploading data sets to be scrutinized for process-improving trend analysis. For this, the IBM Watson Analytics tool set might be a more prudent choice.
And some cloud intelligence is already deeply wedded to processes crucial to B2B processes: CRM, for instance. Salesforce, the industry leader in CRM, offers its Einstein intelligence suite, which comes already integrated with its CRM platform and tools. Businesses can begin using it immediately, without building anything.
